This looks very sensible to me. I remember when I was talking to some people about FF7 stepcount, for slots in particular. I said we can get better enemy formations(with more enemies that is) by doing a couple of fights on a seperate playthrough, then softreset and hit New Game to start the run. I was told that the information is not new at all and that it is simply not done because of some sort of gray zone in the rules. Like you can actually do it but kinda not, it will cause terror if you submit such a run. And that is not necessary, we should totally define any sort of pre newgame manipulation very precisely in the rules of each game where such manipulation is possible. Luz suggestion to use JP Timing would simplify this a lot, basically solve the whole issue at once so I can only say that I agree to this.
Yeah, I agree the JP timing method would make sense. I've had more than a couple FF8 starts where I've been practicing menus and forgot to hard reset before starting the run and ended up getting different battles in the Fire Cavern. I've always assumed it's not allowed but I guess it would indeed fall in the "gray zone". Going until The End makes more sense at least for FF9 where you actually have to mash the text and for consistentcy between the JP community and ours, I'd say to stick with Power On - The End as well.
The VOD rules presented by Luzbel are very strict and I agree with them, as long as they are only required for top times of each category, e.g. top5 or 10. Having such strict rules for newcomers may seem off-putting but are not an issue for those who do take it more seriously.
Changing the timing method would require one to retime every run on the leaderboards. And not all of those vods will show power on-credits. For that reason I am against changing the timing methods. As for the categories, I dont think its fair to enforce series wide rules on how each game organizes its categories without consulting the mods for each game. Some categories allow emu and console on the same boards because the emulators are accurate.
Everything else I can agree with and is pretty much already the status quo
Japanese timer makes sense: Power On helps with evading those shady "hardware manipulation" tricks while The End helps set a real end to the game. I would personally prefer having the run end at the last input, but for some games that may not be possible since your last input is your last attack and you can't know 100% when the last attack is, The End makes it easy and clear for all the games so I completely agree on that.
If a run is cooperative it should definitely be noted, dunno if i like this as being an official run and not something separate tho
Everything else seems fine to me so not much else to say
For the runs that are already accepted on the board you would simply add the default power on and credits time to keep them comparable. Prenew game manipulation has not been done on any of them, this ruling serves more to prevent drama on future submission. Like, what if someone submits an emerald countdown glitch ff7 run. There is no valid reason not to enter it on the board with the current ruleset. Keeping current runs should be no issue.
Since personally I have not run any of the games the rules are directly meant to affect, I don't really have much to say here, although most of my thoughts are directed to points 9/10, and a minor point about timing method.
My minor point is that JP timing is inherently flawed for PC runs, and therefore should not be used. There's also the issue of JP timing having more problems with newer consoles (PS3 and higher, Xbox 360 and higher, Wii and higher) since those systems don't directly boot into the game, but rather into their own OS layer beforehand, and are therefore far from consistent.
As for point 9, Setting a games rules by default before any runs or work exists seems inherently naïve to me. As time goes on and games change, there will never be a consistent start and end point to a game, and so it should be decided on a per-game basis at the point that the community begins work on the game.
For point 10, I in some ways agree with the sentiment, that all active runners should be approached for major discussions. However, I think that there are issues both in only allowing a week, and that people without a time cannot contribute to the discussion. There are plenty of people active within the community that don't have the time to do full runs, or are much happier helping with routing and strat development as well as supporting the runners. Preventing those people from having an opinion and a voice within the community seems overly restrictive to me, as it's a relatively arbitrary goal.
What if someone beats a current WR by 1 sec and then you dont know if its WR or not because the old one didnt have the right timing in the VOD? This is just going to open a pandora's box of issues imho.
Just throwing my opinion into the mix, I don't agree with these standardising the timings across every game and platform to the JP method, whilst we share the same series, every Final Fantasy is pretty different and unique in its own way and as such I like our current method of expert runners in each game micromanaging their own rules and runs of their own games.
If the games were similar then yes I would agree (like the Harry Potter series on playstation), but there's no reason to have standardise the timing rules from FF1 NES and FF13 on PC, it makes no sense. From my own perspective of FFX, there's no value of adding JP timing to it, there's no (known) RNG manipulation so adding minutes to the run adds no value. If there is a need for a change on FF7, then the community of FF7 should decide accordingly whether to change the timing rules, rather than a blanket change across all games and categories. If RNG manipulation was eventually found in FFX, then timing rules could then be considered at that stage.
Of course we could have some rules specific to all games and platforms, we kind of unofficially do by not allowing any hardware manipulation in any run I'm aware of, and a okay quality VOD is pretty much expected as well, but the timing one in particular for me should be dealt with game by game. For such large series such as Final Fantasy or The Legend of Zelda, when people are interested in doing a run of a particular game, they first look at the rules of the particular game they are interested in, rather than look at the rules specific to the entire series.
If any timing change needs to happen, make it power on to last input. Not everyone wants to deal with the endless FF end scenes and credits every run. Though the issue with power on was pretty solidly covered by MLSTRM with newer consoles that don't boot directly into the game.
The rest of the points I can't really say I know enough about to comment on. But the idea of universal categories is nice in theory, but games and communities are different in practice. There's too much variety and personality there and especially trying to categorize games that havent even begun routing and learning just seems silly. Honestly I think that the different communities should deal with their own rules and regulations. There are so many games and community personalities that this is just going to step on toes and cause a lot of problems to initiate.
I don't think cementing blanket rules over an entire series is going to be a lot of fun.
I speedrun as a hobby, the last thing I want to be involved with is a bunch of dumb paperwork when something new (that possibly ignores any of these rules) is found and I have to contact every single runner of the game I'm running and make a forum post and have people vote and.. etc etc.
For me, speedrunning is about fun, I understand there's a competitive side to it that wants to ban foul play, and rightfully so, but we've operated on good faith for so long that I don't really see any point to turn every community decision related into bureaucracy. Also people can tell if there's been tampering most of the time, even if it shows up late, so I'm not really worried myself.
Also outside of the timing/community decisions there doesn't seem to be anything new to me, which is good. It shows the current system of letting each community decide how their speedgame is ran works.
I don't think you can classify FFSpeedruns as a blanket government that should rule over all the FFs, each game is their own community, we come together because we share love of the series; but our rules and the ways we run our games are all vastly different. Even when just coming from FF7 to 8/9 or 10.
Outside of that I don't believe any single game (nor series) has any bureacratic form as described above nor did they ever require it, feel free to correct me if I'm wrong on that one, though.
Also, if we would go JP timing I think we should revolutionize and allow turbo, as well.
Also I feel the need to clarify something as this seems to be misunderstood by a lot of people (and the title of the thread doesn't help but I can't change that)
THESE ARE NOT RULES THAT ARE GOING/HAVE GONE INTO EFFECT. THEY ARE MERELY SUGGESTIONS. PLEASE POST IN THIS THREAD YOUR OPINIONS ON THEM IF YOU WISH FOR POINTS TO BE DISCUSSED.
In terms of the NA/Europe speedrunning community as a whole, what do you guys think it's more common, final split on final hit/input or on the The End screen? I've obviously only seen a fraction of all the games that have ever been ran, but I definitely feel the final input is a lot more frequent.
In that respect, I feel we should also adhere to that whenever we can unless there is a compelling reason not to. I'm pretty certain there's no RNG manipulation to be found in X/X-2/XII, so I don't feel there's any reason to start from new game and finish on The End for those games. If there's a good reason to change the timings for 7, then it should be done just for that game (don't know enough about 8/9 and whether they need the change too).
Finally, FF speedruns are notorious for being ridiculously long and a major barrier for people to speedrunning them (myself included), so I feel we should be trying to prevent them from being any longer than necessary, 20-30 mins of pure cutscenes/credits certainly doesn't help that! :-)
Okay, I'll go to bed! :-)
I know you can modify the stepcount in ff8 pre newgame just the same way as in ff7 at least. I dont really see anything that goes against jp timing. Also to keep it a proper RTA run. Anything after the game boots may contribute to the RNG later in the game. The idea to take influence on the run without having the timer run is something that kinda suggests Single Segment imo but thats the last thing I would want. I mean at the moment we dont have ss forced at any game right? So well its neither proper rta nor ss at the moment kind of if you start the timer at will anywhere in the middle of the run(slight exaggeration for new game screen, but you get the point)
Im going to bed, too have a good night everyone.
Alright, I'll toss my two cents in on some of these.
Suggestions #1/7/8/9/10: Let each community decide their categories, organization and the timings for start and finish. I think MLSTRM lays out the major reasoning why changing the timing system is unnecessary.
Suggestions #2/5: This is already the case for hardware manipulation in most every speedrun community. If you have a runner who doesn't know about that, just inform them and maybe suggest to a mod to make it clearer?
Suggestion #6: Stating the obvious here.
The gist here is that we don't need to make this a bureaucratic congress. Let each community decide their major rules for themselves. Eat, drink, be merry, go fast, and have fun. No need to create rules for games that haven't come out yet.
For a long time I've known the rules to be -Not changing the disc while the console is on except when the game prompts you to -Time ends on the first frame of the final damage number
I don't remember where I read or heard this but it was when I started running a long time ago.
End-time might be a little obscure on 'final hit' but JP time ending isn't much better.
Most of the rules that were posted seem reasonable to me. Speaking for the FF12 community, though, we are generally opposed to the JP timing method. Waiting through the credits is a pointless waste of time of time, stops you from enjoying ending cutscenes (and singing!) and introduces the possibility of something going wrong after a complete run that could stop it from being a record. This may seem unlikely, but it happens; my JP PS2 has a faulty lid detector, so the disc will occasionally stop spinning. This caused me to lose several seconds during the credits in my first JP WR, which is extremely frustrating, as one could imagine. That said, timing from power on to final hit would be a compromise that solves the mentioned issues and would probably meet much less opposition generally, but would punish FF12 runners who want to change their game settings (aspect ratio/sound options/subtitles/etc.).
To me, it's frustrating that people would think to abuse glitches like the emerald weapon glitch, as it goes entirely against the spirit of speedrunning that I've seen in these communities.
